🔔 Update on the project #6626
Comments
What's the issue? What about having two different branches without related parent so you can import Chandler branch right into this repo. |
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I installed and tested Chandler a few days ago. Monica is a great tool and fun to work with, but not perfect in detail. The first impression is really great and the new structure of Chandler is the right step. |
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Have you considered creating a discord server dedicated to Monica/Chandler? That would be a helpful space for people to help each other in the community and make it so that "all discussion" about the project doesn't have to happen here in the Issues tracker. You don't even have to actively pay attention to the channels there if you don't want to, it can be focused around users helping each other. I really like Monica. I LOVE how you can turn off the stuff that you don't care about using it for. Really well crafted tool and I look forward to using Chandler when that branch comes here and the migration is available. Great work all! |
Yes, but we can't keep up with all the feedback we already receive. Do you think this kind of space would be acceptable if we don't actually contribute to it? It's already hard to find time to work on the project - if we need to maintain a new community on the side, we'll never make it alive :-)
Thanks for your kind words! |
A discord server can help REDUCE the feedback that you have coming into here in a good way. This project has over 18000 stars on github! You are doing this work without any serious business goals and people are noticing and recognizing your good work. You get a discord server setup and you'll have various ambassadors hanging out there. For example: #6624 This is a perfect example of something where they user is not submitting a bug report or a feature request. Its a "support request". Channel support requests to discord where you have those Monica ambassadors that can help out and then just leave it alone. If your concern is helping to run the discord, just think about those 18000 stars on github. There are people who love Monica that would be very capable of setting up and running the discord for you (organizing channels, recognizing people who are helpful in the community with distinguishments, etc.). Heck, I'd set one up for you just to take a look at and think about if you want me to. Personally, I'd suggest aggressively pruning your issues and getting stricter with your minimum requirements for what comes into the issues tracker. This would help prepare for the migration where Chandler comes to take over Monica. What help do you feel like you need most with the project right now? Perhaps I can help (I am not a heavy programmer, so don't ask me to do big stuff in laravel). |
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My concern is definitely about running the discord. I know @asbiin and I won't have much time to interact with the community, as much as we want to. We are just limited with our time, like everybody else. And I agree that the increasing number of issues without any answers from us is an indication of that.
I think we'll prune the issue once Chandler is out, to start from scratch.
Marketing, definitely, and community management. Chandler's development is going well, new features are added at a rapid pace. But marketing? Community? This is the hard part for us geeks. Also, why Discord? Is this a popular choice for developers, or OSS communities? |
Ya, that's understandable and us community members generally want you working on the parts that are useful and interesting. Not getting bogged down trying to figure out why someones armv9 CPU isn't properly handling some php instructions or whatever else. You don't need to be active for it to be a successful community resource.
Do you know if github has a nice issues migration tool to move the existing issues to Monica once it is out? If not, you may want to consider moving to the Monica repo sooner than later.
Discord is very approachable for people to join. Many self-hosted apps use discord as their "community hub". Some prefer to use matrix chat. Both are valid, but Discord is definitely more approachable for people to join and participate in. |
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But discord is terrible if you are a new user. It's not searchable, to fix common issues you need to have a discord account and join a server that might not interest you. You get the same 15 questions in the channels, and can't really link to the common answer (like an existing ticket). Discord might be great for enthusiasts, that want to show off some cool hacks/tricks/strategies they use, but it absolutely sucks as support and actively turns me away if the only way to look for guidance is a discord, even if they have a FAQ-Channel |
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That's the hard part about community management: You can't please everyone. Does that mean that you should avoid doing anything? Right now, Monica has hundreds of "issues". And the developers can feel the paralysis from that number of issues that are loosely structured. So what should they try? If a discord helps a good portion of their userbase and reduces the number of incoming Issues (especially the ones that aren't even bugs), its their call whether to try it out. Similarly, if they do try it out and they feel like it is causing problems or failing to do what they hope, it is even easier to shut it back down. The devs have people who WANT somewhere to hangout. Those people are the ones that can really help the project by having conversations off github that the devs never have to see because the community can answer it and scroll on by. That's what a Discord server can help with. Another option that the devs have is to make the Issues section dedicated to ONLY bugs. Then tags can be focused around what areas they involve or paths towards resolution. An example repo of comparable size showcases this well is libsodium. They only have a "bugs" template in their Issues tracker and the template says:
This approach can be nice because github has an easy button on issues to convert them to discussions. And vice versa from discussions. The devs could also do a hybrid approach where Issues tracker is for all active work that they want to track. e.g. When they are actively looking to make a new feature, make an issue for it and plan out/discuss whatever they need to in that one issue. Similarly, when someone submits a bug, the Issues tracker would be the place to be. Thus, the issues tracker would be the "active" list of tasks and Discussions can be everything else. Using discussions doesn't preclude the devs from also having a Discord server if they want too. @djaiss, this is all obviously up to you and what you like, so I leave it to you. You think about what you'd like to see and let me know if you want my help making it happen. |
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You also asked what other projects use discord. Here are a few links (I'm not in all of these discord servers, I just found a couple projects) in case you're curious: Calibre-web, Tandoor recipes, and Navidrome. |
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Many other organizations and repositories use Discord for communication. The problem is always time. It needs more capacity and a permanent moderation. Not every maintainer can offer that in addition. |
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At least on Tandoor-recipes' discord, the project maintainers show up there when they want to. The community ambassadors (people like me who know at least a bit) hang out there and take care of many of the questions that come in. That project only has about 4k stars on github, but the discord has about 1000 members. |
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If the concern is support issues versus development issues, another accessible option might be Answer (https://answer.dev). It's a self-hosted version of something resembling Stack Overflow. Has built-in moderation operations, tags and categories, and more. It's still an early project; I will have to check to see if it has Github login integration. That might be the easiest route to redirecting people to a place for support-type issues in a way that's searchable and open. |
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Thanks for this discussion. Just came back from a week of vacations that I really needed. I wonder if Discord is ideal. Wouldn't Reddit be a better place? More visibility, seems a little bit less closed than Discord in the sense that posts can be public and people can help each other there? |
I've been thinking about this discussion the last few days and no, I don't think that adding a reddit area would likely be helpful. Having 2 forum type areas just leads to increased noise if the users of both forums have large overlap. E.g. Most technical reddit users are very fine with using and logging into github. If you have a sub-reddit, it will be a ghosttown that has duplicate posts between it and here. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/fogproject/ (contrasted to the main forum: https://forums.fogproject.org/). If you're going to do anything with Discord, its going to be to do something different than your Monica issues tracker and discussions area. It would be to have an area for the part of your community that likes to be able to chat together. My theory for the downvotes that my comments have received is from people who don't want to have to go to Discord to get user support. Or don't want to be forced to use Discord. Which, frankly, seems reasonable and worth listening to. If you want to do a better job on your issues tracker, define what you'd like to see and either start enforcing it OR empower people to help enforce it. You don't have to do it all alone. If you want to make issues only be for bugs and active development, then you'd want to create a Technical Help discussion category. And actively move items from the issues tracker to the Technical Help discussion category. Of course, this is all kind of interesting because you're planning to clear out all your issues at some point when you migrate Chandler into Monica. Maybe your best bet to play around with all this stuff in the Chandler repo. Maybe you should seriously consider moving Chandler into Monica repo sooner than later and do the cleanup on issues. Entirely up to you. You let the community know what you want done and how we can help. Separate from the existing github repo that you have, you can also engage another segment of your community via Discord. I still believe that doing so would help with the incoming issues to gh, but I'm fine to leave that as a disputed point if people don't agree that it would help with your incoming work. |
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Discord makes it nearly impossible to reference previous answers. Instead of a single location dedicated to a topic, Discord history is a time-based events list with all active topics interleaved and smeared out across other, unrelated discussions. Are your issue-notification emails overwhelming now? Try reading them in chronological order instead, unthreaded. This is the direct user experience trying to find existing data on Discord. This isn't just annoying; it has the direct effect of preventing useful searches before asking, which leads to lots of negative interactions in the community. I would second the suggestion that this is a good time to separate issues, feature requests and discussions (including support requests and everything else). Then you can point stalebot at the feature requests tag and let the community handle the discussions. edit to add: I just learned that Discord isn't indexed by search engines. So approximately zero people will find existing answers before asking again. |
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I think Discord is a convenient tool that almost everyone can pick up quite easily and that a lot of people are already active on. This makes it "better" than slack for people like me which already have a Discord account, for example, I have a Slack account for a single project, which makes me not want to use slack nor ask help in that because I don't to bother with it. I think Matrix is also a safe bet but not many people use it, maybe the best solution would be to have a Matrix <-> Discord bridge in place. I would be happy to set it up if needed. Coder uses a Discord for assisting users and feedback. I think it works pretty well especially with the "new" forum channels feature. I am the one administering the Codercord bot and I would be glad to port it if a Monica Discord ever opened. Feel free to check it out at discord.gg/coder. |
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Discord now forces people to pay to be members of more servers, which means now I have to delete some of the projects I'm part of if I want to join another. |
To clarify, "regular" discord users can join up to 100 (which is the historical limit anyways, I think that saying discord forces people to pay is a bit of an overstatement) servers/guilds, nitro members can join up to 200, i don't know if it's that big of a deal for most people. |
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Maybe the noisy discord discussion should be in another issue since this issue is about chandler. Any word on when we can expect chandler to be merged into main and officially released? I'm excited |
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Chandler Beta is launched today 🥳 See this post https://www.monicahq.com/blog/chandler-is-in-beta |
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Hope you will like it. Also, sorry for all the bugs we've seen in production, folks. We are actively looking into them. |
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Are there any self-hosting examples for Chandler? I tried looking for docker-compose files in the |
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Same, Chandler in the original repo had an option to use docker to host, as well as instructions on how to do so but I don't find anything in the |
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Would also like a hint how to setup chandler especially with sqlite via docker-compose |
Just insert the GitHub docker image version: "3.4"
services:
app:
image: ghcr.io/monicahq/monica-next:chandler
depends_on:
- db
ports:
- 8080:80
environment:
# see https://github.com/monicahq/monica/blob/chandler/.env.example
- APP_ENV=production
- APP_DEBUG=false
- APP_KEY=secret
- DB_HOST=db
- DB_USERNAME=monica
- DB_PASSWORD=secret
- MAIL_MAILER=smtp
- MAIL_HOST=smtp.server.com
- MAIL_PORT=465
- [email protected]
- MAIL_PASSWORD=secret
- MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls
volumes:
- data_chandler:/var/www/html/storage
restart: always
db:
image: mysql:5.7
environment:
- MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD=true
- MYSQL_DATABASE=monica
- MYSQL_USER=monica
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=secret
volumes:
- mysql_chandler:/var/lib/mysql
restart: always
volumes:
data_chandler:
name: data_chandler
mysql_chandler:
name: mysql_chandler |
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Hello @djaiss, after reading this comment I am very sorry for what happened to you, I do not have such a large open source project but I can understand everything you say. It's a shame that despite having a project as cool as this and such an incredible community, you can't dedicate yourself 100% to the project. I recently launched a project called Opire that makes it easy to create rewards to solve issues, the good thing about Opire is that anyone can create rewards (not just you) in such a way that the community can economically help evolve the software. This way we can encourage other programmers to want to solve these issues. There are more advantages of using Opire that you can see in the documentation if you are interested. I know this isn't going to solve all the problems but at least I hope it can help a little. For now, I would like to put $100 through Opire in the issue that you consider best. |
Opire's co-founder here, and also an Aspie. I didn't know about this project before, but I can totally understand how it has been able to help other aspies and introverts folks. Discovering it has been great - I will totally try it out. I just had a very bad experience not remembering a neighbor's name and I had to deal with anxiety for a week cause of him getting mad about it 😅 I wish I had discovered Monica sooner. I would like to contribute to Monica. As a developer (with some experience in PHP & Vue) I could help with the code, but realistically I already have too much in my plate, and you already have bad experience with people motivated about helping that end up disappearing. I could tackle some bugs and help with small maintenance issues, but definitely I can't compromise to be a proper maintainer - I just don't have enough time. However, I'm willing to help by creating rewards myself in issues that you / the community consider as priority. Especially looking forward for those issues that will help to reduce the amount of attention that the project requires (bug fixes, maybe?). It's not a lot, but I would be able to put around ~$100 per month into funding rewards to encourage others devs to solve the issues. I saw you have a Patreon. If you don't want to install Opire, that's fine - I'll set up a monthly donation to your Patreon. But I would prefer to fund specific issues to increase the amount of devs collaborating and reduce the pressure on you. |
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After this week's report of a year's long takeover attempt that was thwarted by a microsoft employee on xz utils, everyone in the open source world is probably scared of anything that looks like coordinated pressure on open source anything. Monetarily, socially, etc. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read this horrifying story: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24119342/xz-utils-linux-backdoor-attempt Not trying to knock on opire specifically (never heard of it), but I'm just leery of external influence, especially recently. |
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Totally understandable @Szeraax! However, tbh I'm glad the backdoor was tried through open-source - at least that way people like Andres Freund (the Microsoft employee) can check the source. Imagine if this was done in private code - the person/group behind the backdoor could have perfectly infiltrated an employee in the company to make the changes without going unnoticed, and then if someone realized about the 500ms lag they couldn't have investigated what caused it Anyway, that's just my personal opinion - I still can understand everyone being scared |
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@djaiss @Szeraax I'm not sure if y'all started coordinating off line but in the event that it would be helpful to coordinate anything outside of this thread (in lieu of setting up discussions), my email is I'd be glad to work with @Szeraax to help implement the setup of some discussion categories; I think the first step would be just taking a moment to level set on what your expectations would be @djaiss and how we can help things feel less overwhelming on your end. |
Hi @Szeraax I totally agree, I understand the concern and distrust (especially in a project that we have just launched) but to be fair we do not make changes directly to the code (nor do we want to influence what changes are made to the code) or even we do nothing that doesn't already exist, there are competitors like Algora.io or previously bountysource that do something similar. What my colleague and I said is completely true, we want to help the project not only monetarily but also encourage issues to be solved since it's one of the problems that the maintainer mentioned and we simply believe that this tool can help and is the best for it. Anyway, it was just a suggestion 😄 |
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I have no authority here, so please don't think that my voice matters any more than yours does. What happens is up to the developers. Personally, I'm more interested in the comment by Slifty about updates on community management and hearing how the developers think the community can help them with the community management side of this awesome project. |
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@djaiss no stress, but wanted to ping here again in case you had interest in moving forward on exploring what more community involvement could look like. |
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Same here, I'm ready to give some support, so let me know if any updates |
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@djaiss I read the whole post, I have an open source project with 6k stars myself, I would love to add lunar calendar support in monica v5 in an extensible way, which will also support Buddhist calendar users, my suggestion is that we have an instant chat group to gather developers who are capable and want to contribute. Although I closed the PR after adding lunar calendar support in v4 because I didn't get a response for a long time, I still pay attention to this project in the past few years. |
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Hi All, I am big fan, user and Patreon supporter since 2018. Thank you @djaiss for all the work you've done here. It is much appreciated. Looks like the project needs some help now. If you are interested in helping (whatever it means) and you have some spare time and availability to work on the project mid- and long-term then please drop me an email to my Google account : nexor1984 . I will organize a call and mailing list where we can decide how to best help Mazarin and the project. |
tried with this one, or the other link you gave (https://hub.docker.com/r/k714040/monica , which gives me an error) therefore i'm really unsure how to get it to work and would love to, so if anyone has some idea please share |
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@hycday my beta Chandler was working last i checked. You should post a new bug report so that you have a dedicated thread for getting support. Be sure to include your docker compose file so we can review. Feel free to tag me when you post too and I'll be sure to take a look |
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@djaiss Hycday's comment here is a perfect example of what community managers can help with. I went ahead and told them to go file in an appropriate place so that they can get support without clogging up this channel with off-topic discussion. Because I'm not a community manager, I will admit that I went outside of my scope of authority as a fellow consumer by telling Hyc not to clog up this channel. Hyc opened #7333 and since it was a simple question, I was able to provide and answer and I bet the issue will be solved soon. If you have some community managers, they can help keep communication organized where you want it, even if you're wanting something like "All beta issues should go in this thread until further notice!" |
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i can confirm :) the solution worked (one minor open point which i cannot find in the documentation but i made a followup in the ticket) but besides that, it helped me (thanks again @Szeraax ) i'm hoping for some import/export features so that i can feel more at ease with a beta solution, but otherwise, quite happy with what im seeing in the demo, it's really amazing ! you deserve some funding as this is by far the best solution for a rolodex (and actually, seems like the only one) and it can be self-hosted... amazing |
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I am wondering if this issue should be closed, since Chandler has been read-only for about a year at this point and this issue is pinned and directing people there? |
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I keep coming back to this post to see what will happen to Monica. But honestly... I am losing hope in this project. It is really sad, because there is really not a single proper alternative for this project out there. And the idea of Monica is fantastic. |
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@VickyRampin @djaiss I'm a little bit confused. There's this issue, monicahq/chandler#558, that says that it has moved to the |
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I have the same feelings about the project @Pamalosebi . I'm trying to gather some people interested in continuing the work but so far there are only 3 of us. If you'd like to join, drop me an email at nexor1984 in google domain. |
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I am really not a dev @tmuras. I am more from the ops side. I don't think I can be of much help. |
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Hi all. Just to check, when you say the project is dying, can you clarify what you mean? I'm currently using the beta docker version, the last version was published 2 months. For those of us who don't follow development as closely, what is happening there? |
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Do you feel that the project is in a healthy, thriving state? 🤔 @stanleyshly |
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@Pamalosebi I don't think @stanleyshly was asking a rhetorical question, but a genuine one. They don't have enough information to know if the project is in a healthy, thriving state, which is why they asked what they asked! @stanleyshly unfortunately right now the core maintainers of the project are a bit mental blocked on engaging with it; they put out a call for help in March. A few community members offered to step in, but it's been several months and nobody's been empowered to do so. New features aren't really being added, or merged in, and v5 is seriously lacking some very important things (e.g. support for profile pictures / files, as well as the ability to prevent new registrations). All this is to say, it's not clear what the future of monica looks like, and it won't be clear until either the community decides:
or
My hope is still that 2 happens, though hope is all I can do! |
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I only recently found this project and am using it quite a bit, it's a great help that can be super helpful with a few fixes and new features. It seems like there are a lot of people active here. What's stopping us from being active with the issues tracked (like tagging/commenting/helping) and submitting pull requests as fixes? Are pull requests currently not reviewed by anyone? What's the thing that's blocking this projects? It doesn't seem to be a lack of people wanting to help out. |
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As a new user (self-hosting), I'm also unsure of what to do. The docker project (I believe) uses v4, but now that I know that Chandler (v5) is the future, I'm hesitant to start using either v4 or v5 without a clear direction. In my opinion, the data migration shouldn't be a blocker. Finish MVP for v5 THEN worry about data migrations. The bigger issue is the pausing of all development on both branches. Paralysis of analysis is going to kill both versions. |
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Putting in my two cents here, to reinforce public interest. What some other teams have done (e.g. Gitea, HomeAssistant and others) is open a Discord server. I really don't want to see this project die, especially since v5 looks so promising! |
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Please do not move communication to a private (as in non searchable/indexable) gated community. This will make this place even less active. GitHub is already a collaboration tool with public communication like this. |
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I'm with @JoshuaBehrens, please keep the discussions going here on GitHub. Discord is not an option for me and many people I know. |
and others
Hi. Monica's team here.
The project is not dead. Far from it. In fact we've been working for a year and a half on Chandler, the code name of the brand new major version, and we push new code almost daily.
It's available here: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler
Since Monica is still a side project and we have full time jobs and families, we can't answer all the issues that you all create, even though we read them all. We need to prioritize what we do in our limited free time. This is why we put all our energy in creating a brand new experience with Chandler.
Chandler will address a lot of problems Monica has. Not all of them, but we hope it'll make you happy. It's also heavily unit-tested so we hope there will be less bugs. The dev stack remains mainly the same (Laravel (PHP) + VueJS + Mysql/SQLite/Postgre support), but we use Vue throughout the entire app, not just in some cases like we currently have in Monica. For the curious we use https://inertiajs.com to make it possible to use Vue with Laravel. Using Vue for the front end makes a user interface that feels really fast. The UI is also cleaner and more modern, while being sober.
We plan to move Chandler's code to this current repository. Why?
Merging two repositories into one is a hard task, especially when we don't want to lose history of both commit trees. That'll be fun to do.
Before launching Chandler officially, we need to finish an exporter/importer. Chandler's codebase and data structure is completely different from Monica's. Right now, you couldn't import Monica's data into Chandler, so that would suck. We know it's an issue.
Chandler will be more focused on documenting your life, than being a personal CRM. While we kept most of all the current features Monica has, we've put a lot of effort on the journaling/personal diary feature. I mean, a lot of effort. Honestly I think we'll have one of the best journaling system out there and we really hope you'll like it.
So, please be patient. We'll post a new issue when Chandler is ready for testing.
With a lot of love, @djaiss and @asbiin. Thanks for being part of this community.
Below are some screenshots of Chandler, filled with fake data.
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